{"id":71837,"date":"2026-10-28T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=71837"},"modified":"2026-10-27T21:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T02:24:14","slug":"ars-praedicandi-solemnity-of-all-saints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/28\/ars-praedicandi-solemnity-of-all-saints\/","title":{"rendered":"Ars Praedicandi: Solemnity of All Saints"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Ed Foley, OFM, Cap., November 1, 2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This morning we stand on the threshold of a sacred, consequential, and unique Triduum.\u00a0 Not the one of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, but one that in its own ways is similarly about life, death, resurrection and eucharistic discipleship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This unnamed Triduum is launched with today\u2019s festival of All Saints
Takes a sober turn to remembering our beloved dead tomorrow|
On the feast of All Souls
And then dawns on the civic feast of Election Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three distinct moments, yet in our liturgical and moral imagination,
they fold into one another\u2014
forming a single, holy movement of memory, mourning, and public responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in this dawning triduum we find ourselves poised on the threshold between
what was, what is, and what might yet be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this glorious festival of All Saints
we lift our voices to celebrate the Church Triumphant
as well as the unheralded holy ones who yet walk among us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet even now as the sanctuary glows with lights and flowers
And the soaring music raises our spirits
We feel the shadow of tomorrow\u2014All Souls Day
when the church slows its breath, lights candles against the November chill,
and calls to mind our beloved dead:
those whose hands we held, and whose absence
carves an enduring, aching gap in our daily lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As pastoral theologian Herbert Anderson reminds us,
the delicate work of grieving always happens
\u00a0in the fertile space between remembering<\/em> and hoping<\/em>
between honoring a treasured memory
\u00a0and daring to anticipate a new, transformed future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so in the midst of this glorious festival
We also anticipate tomorrow with a remembering that cannot be static
nor a mourning that is quietist but \u00a0galvanizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On All Souls, we will not only mourn those who have physically died
but also those among the living who have lost their energy for life
the weary, the crushed, the broken-hearted,
those whose spirits have been systematically exhausted
by economic instability, injustice, and the relentless noise of an anxious world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then comes Tuesday
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To some, the ballot box feels entirely distinct from the altar.
As if our faith were a private sanctuary
and our citizenship a separate, worldly chore.
But in the geography of the Spirit, Tuesday is deeply, inherently revolutionary\u2014
a moment when the collective voice of the people must be heard,
when power is held accountable to divine compassion,
and when the quiet longings of the vulnerable demand a vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We often suffer from a spiritual amnesia
that splits our world into neat, isolated categories:
the living here, the entombed dead somewhere far off;
the sacred inside these doors, the political out on the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theologian Elizabeth Johnson brilliantly shatters this myth of separation
Writing that together, the living form with the dead
one single community of memory and hope<\/em>.
We are a holy people touched by the fire of the Spirit,
summoned to go forth as companions
bringing the face of divine compassion into everyday life
and the great struggles of history\u2014
wrestling with evil, and delighting even now
when fragments of justice, peace, and healing
gain, however small, a foothold.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consequently our ancestors in faith do not rest in passive, pious silence.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rather the saints\u2014both the named icons of history
and the unnamed grandmothers, laborers, and peacemakers of our own lives
were people who dared to imagine a radically different world.
They were holy subversives:
spiritual equivalents to Galileo pointing his spyglass to the heavens and
altering forever how humanity understood its place in the cosmos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analogously, the saints looked at the brokenness of their empires
and insisted on an alternative reality.
They looked through the lens of the Jesus Kingdom
and saw that the world as it is structured
is not the world as it must be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus our celebrating the saints today is not a grateful journey into nostalgia
But a beckoning to listen for their song
singing back toward the darkness of our present world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their stalwart companioning, they urge us forward\u2014
calling us to take up the unfinished work of love, equity, and peace that they championed in their own generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what is that work?
What is the compass that guides our eucharistic discipleship
Lived out as what Vatican II called faithful citizens of this world and the next?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is laid out on the mountaintop in today’s Gospel reading: the Beatitudes.
For centuries, pious commentaries have tried to tame the Beatitudes,
turning them into passive, domestic virtues\u2014
gentle consolations for the crushed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as peace activist Father John Dear reminds us,
Jesus did not deliver the Sermon on the Mount
as a collection of sweet platitudes to comfort us in our complacency.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Delivered under the iron heel of Roman military occupation,
the Beatitudes were a direct, countercultural critique of empire
a tactical blueprint for active, nonviolent revolution
a manifesto of holy resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Beatitudes announce a breathtaking reversal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n